20100128

Commemorating the icon of how Europe's Nazi's and Fascists exploited Christian anti-Semitism for their political power. (ABC Australia Video)

(AP Video)

A remarkable documentary resource exploring the phenomenon of WWII concentration camps, particularly Auschwitz, should be viewed on DaMoosebelly's Channel on YouTube

This BBC-aired video is the sixth and final volume of "Auschwitz- The Nazis and the Final Solution" in a series that examines the Auschwitz death camp from conception to implementation of the "final solution" which resulted in the execution of over 1,100,000 people. This portion gives an overview of the further atrocities suffered at the hands of Soviet "liberators" as well as some people who took justice into their own hands. Also touched on is the appalling failure of the Allies to prosecute some of the worst war criminals...and even help some of them evade prosecution

Atlas Shrugs has an interesting article about the recently discovered Auschwitz blueprints (allegedly hidden by Amin al-Husseini- Hitler's Mufti) and the Mufti's importing Nazi ideology and techniques for demonizing and annihilating of Jews (as a power-technique) into the Muslim world.

20100125

The Pentagon's report about the motivations of Ft. Hood shooter, Palestinian-American Army Major Dr. Nidal Hasan, omit reference to Islamic religious dogma for Muslims killing of American service-members.

But Carlos Bledsoe, (pictured right) who attacked an Arkansas, Army-recruitment store, answered for the public what the Pentagon report refused to acknowledge. His motivation for shooting to kill white 23-year old Army Private William Long and wounding an 18-year old African-American Army recruiter private wasn't racial. It wasn't political opposition to the war, it was his Islamic religious beliefs. He confessed to the judge in his case that he is commanded, as an American Muslim, to fight those who wage war on Muslims.

(CNN - Jan 22) A Tennessee man -- accused in a fatal attack at a military recruiting center in Arkansas in June -- wants to plead guilty and claims to have ties to al Qaeda in Yemen in a letter he wrote to the judge presiding over his case.

In the handwritten letter dated January 12, Abdul Hakim Muhammad said he did not want a trial and insisted the shooting was "justified" under jihad.

"This was a jihadi attack on infidel forces that didn't go as plan," he wrote. "Flat out truth."

Mr. Muhammad, formerly known as Carlos Bledsoe,(pictured left) is charged with killing Pvt. William Long, 23 (photos left, and wounding Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, 18 (photo right). The attack happened on June 1 at a recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas. In his letter to the judge, Muhammad claimed he had links to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, a group that has claimed responsibility for the attempting bombing of a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day.

"My lawyer has no defense," he wrote. "I wasn't insane or post traumatic nor was I forced to do this act. Which I believe and it is justified according to Islamic laws and the Islamic religion jihad -- to fight those who wage war on Islam and Muslims."

(End CNN article)(Photo right) Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula

To what degree do Muslims living in the West (especially as citizens) have dual-allegiance? Where Islamic law contradicts Western law, how often will Muslims prioritize Islamic law (shariah)? And to what extent should Western society involve itself to insure allegiance to its laws among those with a propensity to subvert its laws, or with an allegiance to promoting a conflicting political system?

A report delivered to the French parliament recommends restrictions on the use of the full face veil for Muslim women in public. It suggests banning the veil in public facilities including hospitals, universities and mass transit. (AP, Jan 26)

20100121

By emerging out from under the distorting reporters of the Middle-East news industry, the IDF's (Israel Defense Forces) true colors are finally being seen with clarity. The integrity which US reporters observed by the IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti shows makes one wonder: who has effectively tainted the world's perception of Israel's ethics for so long? (Photo by Joe Shalmoni courtesy Stand with Us)

The Muqata Blog posted and translated (from Hebrew) this letter from an Israeli soldier serving in Haiti to his parents:

The Delegation to Haiti

In the lifesaving IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti which is housed in tents, doctors prevent disabilities. They administer aid to the sick, provide warmth, love, and a human touch. They love the wounded.

In the IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti which is housed in tents located in the middle of a hell, every complex medical case has an ethics review board.

In the IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti which is housed in tents, the chances of success are debated whether to amputate the entire leg of a child: the chances of a premature infant to survive while on a ventilator in a preemie unit in the tent.

In the IDF Medical Corps Delegation which came from Israel in the Middle East to Haiti, there are American volunteer doctors. They have no other useful installation in which to work in. A doctor and nurse from Germany came. They heard this is best hospital in Haiti. An emergency room team from Colombia arrived with all their equipment and asked if they could set up next to us to be part of our hospital. England is the enlightened country in Europe, the one which has an academic boycott of Israel; twenty British doctors and nurses asked to work with us.

All these people, without exception, stand together at the morning formation at 7 AM in the flag square. The flag of Israel. The flag of a country which was established after the USA was already superpower. After the British left a land under their control. After Colombia was already an established country. After the Holocaust against the Jewish people.

In the IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti which is housed in tents, there are equal rights among all. Equal rights in Haiti, which was a nation of slaves, where even today there exists a great social divide between the rich and the poorest of the world's poor.

The IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti which is housed in tents is the embodiment of ultimate human ethics. Brotherhood at its best. The epitome of the verse from the Biblical portion of Kedoshim, "Love your neighbor as yourself."

The Haiti humanitarian aid operation, recent Obama appointee Rajiv Shah, 36, said, is being conducted in close coordination among USAID, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, other U.S.-government organizations including the Defense Department, and civilian agencies.

The Obama Administration has been criticized for critical delays caused by taking authority for the rescue mission away from the Pentagon in order to put in in the hands of the uninitiated State Dept appointee, Dr. Shah, who they hadn't appointed until 5 days prior to the Haitian earthquake.

“I think it has been a tremendously positive effect” Secretary of the State Ms Hillary Clinton is thrilled that Mr. Raj Shah is on board,” Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, Mr PJ Crowley, told reporters at the daily State Department news conference yesterday.

()

CNN's Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta confirm the dearth of medical supplies and stabilizing resources are disillusioning the overtaxed surgeons, physicians, and nurses on location in Haiti.

National Public Radio criticizes TV medical correspondent physicians are putting themselves into the story at the expense of the patients.

"What disturbs me about the media doctors is that they are basically pulling telegenic people out of the queue and giving them exceptional resources," says Dr. Steven Miles, a medical professor and bioethicist at the University of Minnesota.

Miles served as the medical director of the American Refugee Committee for 25 years, and he has overseen relief efforts in places such as Cambodia, Laos and Banda Aceh, Indonesia. He says doctors who largely have experience working in highly advanced civil societies, including the U.S., may not understand the extreme choices facing those addressing catastrophes such as the one in Haiti.

If reporters who are also physicians want so badly to step out of their journalistic role to help, he argues, they should volunteer instead with relief agencies in Haiti — and set aside an hour a day to grant interviews to their network employers.

U.S. military's just-released report into the Fort Hood shootings spends 86 pages detailing various slipups by Army officers but not once mentions Major Nidal Hasan by name or even discusses whether the killings may have had anything to do with the suspect's view of his Muslim faith. And as Congress opens two days of hearings on Wednesday into the Pentagon probe of the Nov. 5 attack that left 13 dead, lawmakers want explanations for that omission.

John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 commission and Navy Secretary during the Reagan Administration, says a reluctance to cause offense by citing Hasan's view of his Muslim faith and the U.S. military's activities in Muslim countries as a possible trigger for his alleged rampage reflects a problem that has gotten worse in the 40 years that Lehman has spent in and around the U.S. military. The Pentagon report's silence on Islamic extremism "shows you how deeply entrenched the values of political correctness have become," he told TIME on Tuesday. "It's definitely getting worse, and is now so ingrained that people no longer smirk when it happens."

The apparent lack of curiosity into what allegedly drove Hasan to kill isn't in keeping with the military's ethos; it's a remarkable omission for the U.S. armed forces, whose young officers are often ordered to read Sun Tzu's The Art of War with its command to know your enemy. In midcareer, they study the contrast between capabilities and intentions, which is why they aren't afraid of a British nuclear weapon but do fear the prospect of Iran getting one.

The Congressman whose district includes Fort Hood agrees. "The report ignores the elephant in the room — radical Islamic terrorism is the enemy," says Republican Representative John Carter. "We should be able to speak honestly about good and bad without feeling like you've done something offensive to society."

The report lumps in radical Islam with other fundamentalist religious beliefs, saying that "religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor" and that "religious-based violence is not confined to members of fundamentalist groups." But to some, that sounds as if the lessons of 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, where jihadist extremism has driven deadly violence against Americans, are being not merely overlooked- but studiously ignored.Read more.

20100119

By Catherine Bremer PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - The key to working in a disaster zone hospital, where casualties pile up faster than patients can be discharged, is to avoid getting emotionally involved, says Dr. Ofer Merin, an Israeli army trauma surgeon working in the earthquake-shattered Haitian capital.

Dr. Merin, heading a fully equipped hospital brought in by the Israeli military, said the hardest job was triage -- deciding which casualties were most likely to live with quick treatment or most benefit from intensive care without blocking up beds.

It also is vital not to fret about what will happen to orphaned children with limbs in casts who have to be discharged to free up needed beds, Merin said.

"These are ethical decisions we're not used to taking," he told Reuters on a break from his around-the-clock schedule.

"You try to have almost no emotional connection with the patients, which is so different to what we do back home. You just cannot get emotional in a disaster this big."

He breaks into a grin, though, over four babies born at the camp hospital. One of them is a tiny girl named Sourire -- French for "Smile" -- whose two-months-premature birth may have been triggered by the trauma of Tuesday's massive earthquake.

As Merin shows off the facilities, a skinny 6-year-old girl called Jessica is carried in, plastered with grime, dust and flies, and is scrubbed from head to foot with disinfectant.

Six days after the quake, she has just been dug out of the rubble of her collapsed family home. She is too weak to stand so her aunt, who cannot stop repeating "Thank you, God," holds the trembling girl upright for a nurse.

"When they lifted her out we could not believe she was alive," the aunt told Reuters. "She opened her eyes wide and said, 'My name is Jessica Chatain and I am hungry and thirsty.' She didn't cry but her parents wept a human sea."

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed up to 200,000 people and has left countless victims with horrific injuries.

Foreign governments and aid agencies have flown in medics from around the world but they were only able to get to work in the past couple of days. Some are working in dilapidated hospitals crammed with wailing patients in insanitary conditions.

HARD NOT TO CRY

Set up in green army tents on a soccer field near the airport but equipped to treat even complex injuries, the Israeli military hospital is strangely quiet and scrupulously clean. Patients are identified with bar codes and their progress is tracked on a computer network.

Within hours of the surgeons, paramedics, nurses and soldiers landing late on Friday, people on makeshift stretchers with crushed, gangrenous limbs were lined up outside for beds in the intensive care, pediatric, orthopedic and other wards.

More than 300 patients have been treated and discharged.

In intensive care is a woman whose arm was cut off at the rescue scene to free her. In the operating theater another woman is having her leg amputated above the knee to save her from a potentially lethal infection.

Experts say that with earthquakes, trauma to the head often means instant death and chest trauma can mean dying a day later. With damage to limbs victims can survive a few days before the infection of an open wound or broken bone sets in.

"That's why at this stage most of what we're seeing are orthopedic cases," Dr. Merin said.

He tries to stick to his ban on sentiment but wavers at the sound of nurses cheering on another woman in labor in the maternity ward tent.

Jessica was buried alive because she tried to hide under stairs when the rest of her family jumped out of the window of their home. Now she lies contentedly in the pediatric ward with a drip in her arm and Dr. Merin cracks a little bit.

"Six days underground and look at her now," he mutters. "She's going to be fine. These are the times it's hard not to cry."

20100118

Though CBS' Dr. Jennifer Ashton and CNN's Dr. Elizabeth Cohen's video news stories feature Israel's prominent M*A*S*H field hospital, you'd never know it by the omission of any reference to Israel or their field hospital in their story descriptions or blurbs. Why not? Because Israel doing a visibly humanitarian act contradicts their vilified casting of the country, culture, Army, and ethics?
The web editor does their best to marginalize Israel's role in the print story:

Also Monday, a local community hospital with three operating rooms re-opened and just three miles from the large and sophisticated field hospital set up by the Israeli military continues to treat patients and save lives.

Neither story mentions what the problem with America's field hospital is, or why the Israelis are being relied upon, but not recognized, for having to pick up U.S. slack.

In ABC News' Dr. Richard Besser's story, even though he features the Israeli Army field hospital as the saviours of his obstetric crisis, Israel is also omitted in the editors' description online. 3 TV networks news stories feature Israel favorably, 3 networks' websites omit it. Coincidence? Or journalistic-bias?

Israeli field hospital earns accolades as the only aid mission able to do complex surgery in devastated country. CNN reports other missions transfer patients to Israeli base. ABC reported on young woman giving birth there.

CNN reported that Israel is the only state so far to have sent a field hospital equipped with all that is required for surgical operations. Doctors from various missions send patients requiring surgery to Israel's makeshift hospital, particularly those whose condition is critical, the news network said.

According to the report, other field hospitals contain no more than stretcher beds and medical teams who administer first aid, and they are not prepared for complex surgery.

More than 100 injured patients require surgery, but are unable to get it anywhere except at the Israeli field hospital in Port-au-Prince. The doctors are unable to meet the demand, and meanwhile the patients lie in tents, administered with painkillers, and cry for help. "They'll die within 24 hours if they don't get operated on," CNN's Medical Correspondent Dr. Elizabeth Cohen reports.

Criticism against the US mission was voiced in the ABC News item. The US had sent staff for a field hospital, but they had still not received the instruments required for surgery. The equipment was supposed to arrive by the weekend, but will get there only Monday night, it seems. Only then will the US be able to set up its field hospital. The Obama White House said that a US ship, to be used as a floating hospital, is also on the way from Baltimore to the earthquake-torn country. The ship, with 600 doctors and nurses as well as medical equipment is due to arrive within two days. (Ynet Mon 18 Jan 2010)

Harvard's Dr. Jennifer Furin treating Haiti's infectious-diseased: "No one except the Israeli hospital has taken (to save the lives of) any of our patients!" With tiny Israel from the far-side of the planet shipping, manning, and running the only humanitarian, mobile surgical hospital on the scene, another American doctor comments about their need to put-upon Israel, America's tiny, under-funded ally, "This almost makes you embarrassed to be an American." Watch CNN's Dr. Elizabeth Cohen's video news report

The Israel Defense Forces' field hospital is currently the largest operating in Port-au-Prince. It has a staff of over 40 doctors, with different specialists, nurses, paramedics and features a maternity ward, ICU, pediatrics unit, internal medicine department, a pharmacy, and operating rooms. The hospital can treat up to 500 patients a day.

Footage from the IDF Field Hospital that has been set up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after the earthquake. This video includes footage of the first baby born at the field hospital on 17 January 2010. The mother arrived at the IDF field hospital 8 months pregnant and Maj. Dr. Shir Bar and Maj. Efrat Shayer delivered a healthy baby boy, whose mother named 'Israel' in tribute.

Exactly one year ago, Israel established a free humanitarian hospital to treat wounded Palestinians on the Gaza border. Hamas denied ill Palestinians access to these humanitarian medical services, which operated empty for weeks.

20100109

September 11 taught us many lessons. To our peril, we have forgotten them. Most of the current acrimony over counterterrorism is stale. The debate is simply a rehash of issues that were discussed and, in fact, resolved early last decade. Let us review them one more time:

MOST TERRORISTS ARE NOT POOR AND DOWNTRODDEN

September 11 taught us that a Mohammed Atta or a Khalid Sheikh Mohammed does not commit mass murder out of hunger, want, illiteracy, or Western oppression.

No doubt Middle Eastern poverty contributes to religious violence. But the poor in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Yemen are no more impoverished than those in the slums of São Paulo, Mexico City, Ho Chi Minh City, or Johannesburg. And the latter, despite their frequent claims against the West, do not feel a need to murder in mass in the name of their particular religion.

A Major Nidal Hasan or an Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab wishes to kill Westerners not because he is poor or even on behalf of the poor, but rather out of a warped sense of pride, hurt, and anger.

Such passions derive from a radical religious creed that insists that comparative failure in the modern Middle East is not self-induced — much less a product of fundamentalism, anti-Enlightenment thinking, autocracy, gender apartheid, tribalism, corruption, and statism. Instead the fact that there is no longer an intercontinental caliphate of rich and powerful believers is due to some sort of contemporary Jewish or Western oppression.

ISRAEL IS NOT THE PROBLEM

Just because radical Muslims and the Arab Street claim that a Jewish presence on the West Bank is the catalyst for terrorist outrage does not make it so — any more than Hitler’s insistence that Versailles drove him to the invasion of Poland in 1939, or Argentinians’ claims that their problems in the early 1980s originated with the British “occupation” of the Malvinas.

No Germans today are blowing up Poles for the loss of Danzig and East Prussia. Greek Cypriots are not planting IEDs at Turkish embassies to force the return of ancestral homelands. And the world is not concerned about the divided city of Nicosia or Russian occupation of the Kuriles.

No, what privileges the Palestinian question is largely three factors that have nothing to do with disputed ground: 1) The presence of huge amounts of oil on Arab lands,

2) Endemic anti-Semitism in the West and at the U.N., and

3) Fear of radical Islamic terrorism.

Take those considerations out of the equation, and the West Bank is about as important to the world as a disputed South Ossetia. We forget that there were three Middle Eastern wars well before the so-called occupation of Palestine. Gaza did not become a calm place once the Israelis left.

Should Palestinians cease the violence, welcome investment from elsewhere in the Arab world, and establish a consensual government, one transparent and free of corruption, the West Bank could become like Dubai — and deal with Israel as a responsible neighbor adjudicating a common border. And yet radical Islamic terrorism in general would nevertheless continue with fresh and always mutating grievances.

20100107

(Jihad Watch) Three men in a car sprayed automatic gunfire into a crowd of churchgoers in southern Egyptian as they left a midnight Mass for Coptic Christmas, killing at least seven people in a drive-by shooting, the church bishop and security officials said.The attack took place in the town of Nag Hamadi in Qena province, about 40 miles from the famous ancient ruins of Luxor. A local security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, confirmed that seven were dead and three seriously wounded.

Bishop Kirollos of the Nag Hamadi Diocese told The Associated Press six male churchgoers and one security guard were killed. He said he had left St. John's church just minutes before the attack.

"It is all religious now. This is a religious war about how they (Muslims) can finish off the Christians in Egypt," he said.

The Copts are the unswerving, the descendants of the original Egyptians who did not, when the Arabs came, give up and accept Islam. Enduring the humiliation, degradation, and permanent physical insecurity of the dhimmi status, many Copts not unsurprisingly fell away, gave up, accepted Islam, took Arab names and thought of themselves no longer as Copts but as Arabs. They forgot their own past. But that was not enough for some Muslims, and there were episodes of mass forced conversions intermittently over the past thousand years.

In November, an unidentified man raped a Muslim 12-year old Qena province girl. She told police that she was only certain that her attacker wore a black jacket, nothing beyond. To preserve the girl's honor (in the face of Muslim law disregarding a woman's testimony against a Muslim men) it is alleged, a libel was concocted with a Coptic Christian perpetrator.

Reports estimate that 10 pharmacies and 55 shops and businesses in Farshoot and several nearby villages were vandalized, torched or damaged during the few days of Muslim, anti-Copt riots which began on Nov. 21. In Farshoot alone, about 80 percent of Coptic businesses were destroyed, which translates to about over $1 million in damages.

Muslims rationalized the massacre as revenge against Coptics for the rumoured rapist's ethnicity.

20100106

While Israel works to achieve a mutual acceptance with its neighbors and enemies, the anti-Israeli criticism in the media, the universities, churches, and in the international community persists. Among the voices that defame Israel is U.S. former President Jimmy Carter. In spite of the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, and in spite of the Oslo accords with the Palestinians, the disengagement, and Camp-David and Madrid conventions these elements continue to blame Israel for the lack of solution to the conflict. The famous American lawyer and Harvard professor, Alan Dershowitz, walks us through the fundamental issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with the help of many Israeli and American political, law and academic leaders. Produced by Gloria Greenfield. (Courtesy Growchange)